Jan Van Bijlert

JAN VAN BIJLERT (Utrecht, 1598 - 1671).
"Portrait of a Lady with Children".
Oil on oak panel. Cradled.
Measurements: 100 x 80 cm; 127 x 108 cm (frame).
The arrangement of the characters in this painting is the usual in the Dutch portraits of the time, with the gaze on the viewer. Following a pyramidal composition the author presents us with a mother in the center of the scene with a Child on her lap and behind them a girl looks at the woman. The author relies on a scene of long tradition in terms of composition, since it shows many similarities with the representations of the Holy Families, starring the Virgin, the Child and St. John. All of them show concentrated and serene faces, typical of the portraits of characters belonging to the wealthy society of the time, a social group enriched by the international trade of the Dutch nation. Formally, it is also worth mentioning the sobriety and balance of the tones used, highlighting only the red touch of the tablecloth, which occupies the visual center of the scene.
Dutch Baroque painting from around the time of the Eighty Years' War (1568 - 1648) is known as Dutch Golden Age painting. It shows many characteristics of European Baroque, except, usually, the love of Roman Christian splendor and themes. The large production of the time is striking, whose recipients were the increasingly wealthy urban bourgeoisie, something that goes hand in hand with the proliferation of pictorial genres. It was in the painting of the Dutch school where the consequences of the political emancipation of the region, as well as the economic prosperity of the liberal bourgeoisie, were most openly manifested. The combination of the discovery of nature, objective observation, the study of the concrete, the appreciation of the everyday, the taste for the real and material, the sensitivity to the seemingly insignificant, made the Dutch artist commune with the reality of everyday life, without seeking any ideal alien to that same reality. The painter did not seek to transcend the present and the materiality of objective nature or to escape from tangible reality, but to envelop himself in it, to become intoxicated by it through the triumph of realism, a realism of pure illusory fiction, achieved thanks to a perfect and masterful technique and a conceptual subtlety in the lyrical treatment of light. Because of the break with Rome and the iconoclastic tendency of the Reformed Church, paintings with religious themes were eventually eliminated as a decorative complement with a devotional purpose, and mythological stories lost their heroic and sensual tone, in accordance with the new society. Thus, portraits, landscapes and animals, still life and genre painting were the thematic formulas that became valuable in their own right and, as objects of domestic furniture - hence the small size of the paintings - were acquired by individuals of almost all classes and social classes.
Jan Hermansz van Bijlert was a Dutch Golden Age painter from Utrecht, one of the Utrecht Caravaggists, whose style was influenced by Caravaggio. He spent about four years in Italy and was one of the founders of the Bentvueghels circle of Nordic painters in Rome. Jan van Bijlert was born in Utrecht, son of the glassmaker Herman Beernts van Bijlert. It is possible that he received some training from his father. Later he was a pupil of Abraham Bloemaert. Like other Utrecht painters, he traveled through France and Italy. In 1621 he was, along with Cornelis van Poelenburch and Willem Molijn, a founding member of the circle of Dutch and Flemish artists in Rome known as the Bentvueghels. In 1625 he returned to Utrecht, where he married and joined the schutterij. In 1630, he became a member of the Confraternity of St. Luke of Utrecht and the reformed church. From 1632 to 1637 he served as deacon of the guild, and in 1634 he was appointed regent of the Sint-Jobsgasthuis. In 1639 he helped found a school for painters, the "Schilders-College", where he served as regent.